


more than the stars

by utlaginn



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (slight) - Freeform, Bars and Pubs, Eloping, Established Relationship, Fluff and Smut, Honeymoon, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, M/M, Porn With Plot, Road Trips, Size Kink, Star Gazing, Switching, Timeline What Timeline, sexual evolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:21:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29731056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/utlaginn/pseuds/utlaginn
Summary: A road trip, a couple rings, and the American Southwest.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21
Collections: Sheithlentines 2021





	more than the stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Green_Destiny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Green_Destiny/gifts).



> Happy Sheithentines 2021!
> 
> This is my gift for Green Destiny, who asked for: established relationship; tons of kissing / PDA; a honeymoon; a road trip; and both of them being thirst traps who don’t realize when they’re being hit on. Most importantly, I hope what comes across is the spice and the happiness and love you asked for.

*☆▴✧*❂*Night 2*❂*✧▴☆*

Keith’s always liked the light inside shitty little dive bars like this.

He likes most everything about them, actually. Bars that are open twenty-four hours, where even in a big city like Las Vegas, you can disappear into a high booth in the corner, into the indeterminate color of the walls. Unless you happen to step in on a weekly karaoke or pub quiz night, bars like this usually float just under the noise level inherent to any establishment that serves alcohol.

So now, it’s almost quiet. Almost intimate.

Other than the occasional cackle of a middle-aged waitress or the squawking of locals’ surprise encounters—and these will never fail to charm Keith in how utterly _un_ charming they are.

Besides. If he and Shiro actually wanted to escape the noise, altogether, they could’ve gone to space.

But then… no. Nowhere but the literal vacuum of outer space would have been truly quiet, for them. They’d been talking about all the trips they’d take—all the trips they’d already taken, and how the vast, exhausting beauty of space had become something to run from rather than toward. 

It had been on the table, still. Space, for the honeymoon. All these years and there are still a million planets they haven’t visited. A thousand galaxies. A hundred amazing tours they could’ve taken, a dozen races waiting to host the Black Paladin of Voltron and the Captain of the Atlas in exchange for stars knew what promises of future diplomatic relationships.

All the charm in all the worlds wouldn’t have made up for that noise.

And nothing would have—nothing _could_ ever compare to the simple pleasure of being together.

So. 

A road trip through the American Southwest, it is.

“Maybe a little easier to stay anonymous there than on an all-expense-paid galactic cruise,” Shiro had half-joked.

But he was right. And so they’d stayed away from anything mainstream, or high-end. 

Under the too-dim light of the shitty dive bar on the fringes of downtown Las Vegas, Keith ducks down against the bartop so he can catch the eyes of his husband—his _husband_ —and look up at him. 

“Shiro?”

Shiro turns from his conversation with the bartender. Graceful, like he always is. Not even like he’s interrupting, or been interrupted. “Yes, love?”

“I’m really glad we’re here.” 

“I am, too,” Shiro answers. Smiling, but almost like Keith’s sudden—and obvious—comment worries him, somehow, he asks, “Everything alright?”

Keith nods. Maybe he’s a little too honest, a little too straightforward, at times. But when he finally answers, “Just thinking,” and feels Shiro reach for his thigh and squeeze reassuringly, he knows he doesn’t have to be anything other than exactly what he is, when he’s here.

Just like a place like this? Doesn’t have to be quiet. Doesn’t have to be noisy, or entertaining, or charming. 

All it has to be is honest.

That’s what they both had wanted. 

And in that, there’s something nostalgic about it. About sitting here, in an undemanding setting, with a person who is _quite_ demanding. Perhaps not even intentionally; but Keith knows Shiro has always thought the world of him. Even when—perhaps especially when—he didn’t deserve it. But something about that relentless belief had always made Keith want to show off for Shiro. More than that: it’s always made him want to be the reason for Shiro’s smile.

The way Shiro’s smiling softly as he gazes at Keith, now.

This memory will be nostalgic, too, one day. The way some of his other memories along similar lines have been for years.

He’d tried to explain that to Shiro, once—how these kinds of places remind him of some of his earliest memories, when he was still small enough for his dad to sneak him into the local watering hole with little more than a faux-stern, side-eyed glance from the bar’s owner. Shiro had struggled to see it as anything other than sad, at first. But Keith had explained that the old woman was one of the only people in that tiny town who still spoke to his pops like he was a person and not a hermit who had eloped with an alien. Which was exactly what he was, of course—but people like that patroness saw deeper. Saw to the truth of his father: that he was lonely, and that he needed someone who was not a toddler to talk to. However much that toddler and his (presumed) dead mother had meant to him.

Shiro still struggles not to see Keith’s memories as sad, sometimes. But he’s never pitied Keith, and he’s certainly never judged him for the less than traditional upbringing that led him to such badly-lit memories that he calls happiness.

So yeah, Keith likes shitty dive bars. 

Even more than that, he likes sitting here, at the slightly-sticky bar-top, with the man he loves.

With Shiro. 

*☆▴✧*❂*Night 9*❂*✧▴☆*

What Keith does _not_ particularly like—what is shocking, in fact, even at this point, even after however many times in however many shitty little dive bars in a thousand corners of the universe this _exact_ same thing has happened—is that now, even low, anonymous lighting is not enough to hide them from their fans.

They’re somewhere in Oklahoma, probably, and they’ve got one on either side of them. Keith’s not exactly sure how they were coaxed away from their cozy little corner-booth, but they’re sitting at the bar now. 

To address his own problem:

The girl next to him is smoking. Granted, it’s one of those sort-of-nice smelling cigarillos, the kind with the wood tip that for some reason women seem to like. Beyond their radius, the air still smells a little—a _lot_ —like the more-offensive cigarette smoke that defines places like this. Because despite the fact that it’s the year 3041 and humans have known for a literal millennium how fucking terrible for you smoking is, there are still places on the North American continent were you can smoke in a bar. 

(Keith would be lying if he said _he’d_ never smoked a cigarette in a bar in one of Nevada’s rural, rustic little towns, but, that’s neither here nor there when he hasn’t done so since before the Blue Lion flew them into an inter-galactic war.)

(She’d offered him one. One of her cigarillos. Keith would also be lying if he said he hadn’t been tempted—but Shiro detests tobacco—and had also leaned into Keith's space, his warmth and the woodsy, spiced scent of him more intoxicating than the beer by far, and whispered, “I think she’s flirting with you.”)

(Keith had had to hold his breath for about five full seconds before he was able to turn to her and explain in excruciating detail thad didn’t seem excruciating until it was over how he was with his partner and he was flattered but was also taken and also wasn’t into girls and he was sorry, he didn’t realize—)

To address Shiro’s problem:

To the right side of Shiro sits a man not quite as big as Shiro but who is trying to be as impressive. Talk of his engineering degree and his fascination at the way Shiro’s shoulder-joins make barely a sound might be impressive—but _everyone_ knows, by now, that both Shiro’s Galra arm and his Altean arm had been, in their respective ways, noisy and enough of a distraction to encourage the Garrison to design something more streamlined, something with more grace. 

“But I suppose that was all function and no form,” the man is saying, bumping up against Shiro—

—in a way that Shiro probably (definitely) interprets as friendly—

Keith’s jaw goes tight and he wants to grind his teeth. In years past, he definitely would have done it. Would have bit the inside of his own cheek to taste blood, to either distract himself from (in the early days) or to punish himself for (more recently) how jealous he gets when other people notice his best friend.

But he doesn’t have to do that, anymore.

Not for months, has he had to do that. For months, now, the only reason he’s had to bite his own mouth comes down to the times he's had to restrain how much he wants to climb Shiro like a tree and fucking claim him in each and every new place they occupy. And for almost two weeks, now, he’s just been biting his lower lip each time he happens to look down at one of their hands and remembers that claimed each other.

(That’s a little more obvious than the cheek-biting had been.)

(Of course, Keith kinda wants Shiro to notice the lip-biting.)

So, now, Keith just breathes. He doesn’t bite anything. Instead, he feels his muscles relax as he takes the spouse’s prerogative.

“Lucky Shiro’s always been form _and_ function, whatever equipment he’s had.” 

He’s not quiet about it. Everyone sitting at the bar looks at him. Shiro, included. Keith takes a sip of his drink and doesn’t care how many other eyes are on him when those eyes are. 

Shiro’s eyes are more hazel than gray, with the purple light created by the blend of the on-tap advertisements for cheap beer. The slight rise of the scar across his nose is lit from above by the neon red of the Newcastle sign hanging above the bar. But far from bloody, it looks soft, and inviting, and familiar. Keith knows it doesn’t hurt Shiro—not anymore—but he still kind of wants to pet his fingers over the healed skin. So he reaches out. Tipsily—a little more than he realized he was—and brushes a strand of hair away from Shrio’s eyes. Eyes that crinkle with mirth and the joy of safety.

“You’re shameless.” 

Keith shrugs. He is, but that’s beside the point.

He looks at the man he married and thinks about all those features that would be even more luminous had Shiro still had his Altean arm. 

(Thank god; the designer of the glowing, floating arm certainly had not been concerned with anonymity.)

“ _You’re_ encouraging strangers to flirt with you,” is Keith's response to the "shameless" accusation.

“You started it.” 

Keith continues as if he hadn’t heard, “On our honeymoon.”

It’s the last word that catches Shiro’s attention. 

Keith still hasn’t found his inside voice, and Shiro tucks in on himself. “I thought you said you wanted to keep that on the DL,” he says—much more quietly than Keith. He always looks a little silly when he tries to do that; he’s the biggest person in most rooms even when they’re not planeside. He looks even sillier when he starts to color, adding, “And the guy next to me is not flirting.”

Keith looks down at Shiro’s hand, then. His left hand, wrapped around the glass of whatever was on tap, and how from every angle, no matter how brilliantly the glass or the liquor refract the light, the thing that really glows in the dim light is the new, palladium ring on the fourth finger.  
Keeping his eyes on it, Keith says, “Neither was she.”

Now Shiro buries his face in his hands, at last turning away—in a way lacking almost any grace whatsoever—from their company. “Shit."

Keith hums. "I'm right, then."

"I know. Sorry, baby.”

Keith is feeling charitable enough—always will, where Shiro’s concerned—that he shrugs it off. “It’s only a matter of time until our rings end up on the cover of some tabloid. It’s actually kind of entertaining to see what people think they can get away with before they notice.” 

And it is. The way his chest expands—bad lighting and long history illuminating him from the inside—when Shiro turns and _apologizes_ to the guy who’s so badly flirting with him, flashing that wedding ring briefly before he pivots again on his bar stool and and looks directly into Keith’s eyes. 

“I’ll make sure people notice sooner,” Shiro says, covering Keith’s right hand with his left.

He leaves Keith’s left hand alone. And Keith’s own ring is free to glitter contrarily under the dim lights.

*☆▴✧*❂*Night 1*❂*✧▴☆*

They decide to honeymoon on Earth, directly after their spur-of-the-moment wedding.

Keith can only speculate the level of fanish extravagance that would found them at every stop along the way had they announced anything. It would’ve been way more than the jibes from those they invited to the celebration of their nuptials. It would’ve been civilians, fans and strangers, people who wanted to talk about how much their love meant to them in the abstract—but who, really, wanted to feel that love vicariously.

And anyway, no words from any support, friend or stranger, would’ve been more exciting than the very sound of the words “wedding night.” 

They’d spend the first night after their wedding in Las Vegas, of course. Las Vegas is absolutely incorrigible. Not only do they literally pass a sex shop on Las Vegas Boulevard on the way back from the courthouse. Not only is it still one of the only places in the universe you can get a marriage license the day you want to get hitched. (Literally, the whole universe. What kind of hang-ups do most living creatures have that they’re legally mandated to wait a matter of days to make sure they don’t change their mind about the person they’re about to make a life-long vow to?) It is also one of the only places on Earth you can buy experiences of the sexual variety. Yes, sex-work is legal in Clark County—has been for centuries—but the thing that interests two people who don’t want to put their hands on anyone but each other is the myriad ways sex is sold without any actual sex on display.

Strip clubs, of course, but more subtle offerings. There are nightclubs. There are shows. There’s a weird little thing in the middle of a club and a show that they’ve heard of called “The Green Door” which Keith still isn’t one hundred percent convinced is a real thing. Though there’s something of the exhibitionist in him—they’ve been in the public eye too long for something about the performance of it not to sound appealing, in theory—this, he doesn’t want to share with anyone else.

Not the amazing, mind-blowing, infinity-ending sex he’s been having with Shiro.

They’ve been having great sex for months, of course. Even the first time had been great, when Keith had been inexperienced and nervous as hell but so beyond gone for this man that he’d stopped relying on their duel burdens as Captain of the Atlas and Blade of Marmora as an excuse and had recklessly, stubbornly waited in Shiro’s berth on the Atlas until Shiro had come home, late and tired and fed-up—but never too fed-up for Keith. Throughout the war and the diplomatic nightmares and the out-of-body experiences, Shiro has never been anything other than utterly present with Keith. Even that time, Shiro had cut right to the heart of why Keith was there. Somehow, he’d intuited what Keith needed; he always had, of course, but that time, the physical language between them was as fiery as it had ever been and then some, all their hoverbike races and power struggles and the fight to near-death included. And Shiro had blown past all the tentative kisses they’d already shared, and he’d let Keith climb into Shiro’s lap like he had any right to it. 

So, their first time time had been great. 

But somehow, honeymoon-sex utterly changes Keith’s definition of great. 

It’s only now, once he’s married him, that Keith tells Shiro outright that he wants to get fucked.

He didn’t think he’d have to. He’d thought that the way he’d been rolling over for Shiro and melting under every strong, impressive inch of him for _weeks_ had already spelled it out pretty clear. 

Their first time having full-on intercourse, a couple months ago, Keith found himself under Shiro as Shiro rode _him_ , with Keith biting his lip and gasping at the feel of it until Keith had to beg to be let on top, to be allowed to rut all his inexperience into his lover’s body.

And now, when Keith tells Shiro what he wants—“I want you,” he says, his voice cracking on the longing and the love and the lingering shame of how much he wants—

Shiro asks, “Have you ever done it that way?”

“N-” 

Keith shakes his head. The light of the Las Vegas Strip limns their naked bodies in the dark and Shiro knows very fucking well that Keith hasn’t had sex with anyone else. Keith has fingered himself, obviously, but Shiro still insists, kissing along his throat as he plies his way verbally under Keith’s skin:

“It’s not the same as the way you open up for someone else.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Keith rebuts.

Shiro stops. His lips disconnect from the heat of Keith’s skin and he cocks his head. Keith hates that he’s done anything that would make Shiro stop kissing him. “Why not?”

“Why not what?” Keith whines, grabbing at the bare skin of Shiro’s back like he can press his fingerprints into that space, mark Shiro as a part of him.

“Why wouldn’t you have bottomed for someone else?”

Keith chokes. On laughter, on truth, on the “I was waiting for you” that he wants to say—that he does say, and if that isn’t the most embarrassing thing he’s ever uttered in Shiro’s hearing—and has he ever said a lot of stupid shit in Shiro’s hearing—

But the heat in Shiro’s eyes more than makes up for that humiliation.

So Keith explains what, exactly, he wants about it.

“I… I want to feel full. Of you. _Only_ of you. I want to feel overwhelmed the way I do when you’ve got me pinned when we spar, or on my knees when—um.” Keith swallows. And he isn’t embarrassed of how needy he’s shown himself to be when he’s got Shiro’s cock almost to the back of his throat, but this is different, somehow. “But yeah, I want to feel that way on his back. With my lover inside me.” He swallows. “With my husband inside me, now.” 

Why that hits different than the thought of fingers or toys is something he can’t explain, though Shiro seems to enjoy watching him try.

He’s practically drooling, watching Keith try.

“Okay,” he gasps. It’s barely a word, until he repeats, “Okay, baby. Let me help you figure out what you need?”

Keith nods, solemn and sure.

They start with toys, anyway.

Because at the end of the day, Shiro is, in fact, a sadist; and Keith is, in fact, a masochist. Keith wants to take more than he can handle. Shiro wants to see him beg for it. And Las Vegas is, in fact, the perfect city for sexual exploration at all hours of the night.

Keith does beg. Oh, does he beg, and try under Shiro’s satisfied gaze to articulate what he wants and how much he wants it. So that Shiro can understand. So that Shiro can help him through it, the way he’s helped him through everything else.

Keith is incoherent as he opens up around the widest part of the biggest plug they had been able to find in that sex shop on Las Vegas Boulevard and revels in how it’s just a little big bigger than Shiro himself, and he lingers on it, on how Keith all but swallows him back in when he plays so skillfully with him.

“You want me to fuck you now?”

Keith shakes his head, like he has every other time Shiro has asked tonight. It’s so confusing, to say no to what he wants so desperately—it’s fucking hot as shit, if he’s honest, and the idea that Shiro will continue to ask him, for all the rest of the nights for the rest of their lives, is what has Keith wanting to come, untouched. 

Tonight, he’s sore, and overwhelmed, and the idea of having anything bigger up there makes him want to roll over and goes to sleep more than anything else.

But, it’s their wedding night. And something about the tease of not having it, now, is a promise. The way the words they’d cobbled together for each other in the courthouse had been a promise.

“You want me to fuck you tomorrow?”

Keith nods. And this time, there’s no hesitation. There’s only relief, as he nods again, and pulls Shiro down over him.

In the morning, they have breakfast. Over bottomless mimosas (they’re planning to spend another day in sin city, looking for the perfect road trip rental—so if they’re a little hungover this afternoon, it won’t matter too much), Keith bites the inside of his bottom lip and thinks of all the nights to come. He does it softly, just nipping the inside of his lip so Shiro won’t notice. Of course, he notices, anyway. He notices everything. But his smirk is nothing to Keith’s resolve, nothing to the long discipline of containing his thirst for his long-time best friend and most important person. As they test out a number of economical and then flashy and then frankly obscene desert-tested rides, Keith wills his arousal down to levels manageable enough to make piloting—driving—comfortable again. 

The next morning, they head south, to Barstow, and then east on Route 66. 

They could’ve taken Highway 40, of course—after all, they’re going to have to merge onto it at times to get around the centuries-old dereliction that is wide swaths of the ancient highway—but Keith, being born in the southwest, had always wanted to travel the Main Street of America. 

*☆▴✧*❂*Night 14*❂*✧▴☆*

The route ends in Chicago.

For them, it ends in a bar with dirty jazz playing on low over the only speaker in the place, vaguely situated behind a gaudy chandelier—because gay bars tend to lean into the awareness of how precious a spoken word in low light can be—and just a couple people who recognize them in the dim. Keith recalls walking up the road to their hotel, and bracing cold, and then an amazingly decadent room in a high tower over the canals of the Chicago River they charge to one of Allura’s diplomatic accounts. 

Shiro had said, when they checked in that afternoon, “I know it probably doesn’t fall under the incidental clause in our contracts, but…”

The way he grins lets Keith know he was never thinking of trying to make this fit neatly into their everyday.

“I thought we’d earned it.”

And—somehow—that is the sexist thing Keith has heard since they got on the road.

They don’t even bother with any of the room service they’d teased each other about, over the miles of backroads and barely-respectable inns. They’re not really hungry. What they are is here, and alive, and what seems like three of their four walls are floor-to-ceiling windows.

(Shiro will make fun of Keith’s excitement about this in the morning. He’ll question how someone who’s spent so much time in the cockpit of an inter-galactic cruiser can possibly think a place like this offers anything approaching a view. Keith will sulk a little bit about how Shiro doesn’t seem to understand that Keith’s earth-bound fantasies always ended in a place like this—a place he could never afford, a place with a scale he could never imagined when the biggest place he’d ever seen was Phoenix, Arizona.)

For now, Shiro is actually using that weight to pin Keith up against the window. Keith doesn’t disbelieve for a second that Shiro could remove all the remaining layers between them and fuck Keith right against the glass—right up against the city. Shiro’s fucked him against enough walls during their honeymoon for Keith’s animal brain to thrill at the idea—

At the thought of how no measure of kissing in museums and in liminal diners in the middle of the Americas could compare to showing one of the remaining big cities in the world the way Keith, no matter how strong, how big he’s become, is absolutely dwarfed by this man—

But it doesn’t matter what kind of city-scape can peek in on them. 

Because in the end, it’s just them. 

Just the two of them, and satin sheets. 

Shiro is done teasing by the time they make it to the bed. By the time his back hits those sheets. They could be anywhere in the universe and it would be the same: Keith: wondering, confident but still a little blown over, like having Shiro’s massive body under his is exactly the kind of privilege it is.

Shiro will probably make fun of him for this in the morning, too. As much as he’s capable of actually making fun of anyone. Which is to say, in that too-honest way people who expect the world of you have of pointing out truths. But—

This has always been one of the things Keith loves about Shiro kissing him in public. It’s the way he knows he looks, all whipcord slight and willing, underneath the man of his dreams. 

*☆✧*❂*Night 4*❂*✧☆*

Outside of cities like Albuquerque and Las Vegas, the southwestern sky gets very dark, very quickly. 

Keith is driving. Partly because they’ve been lucky enough to rent a classic convertible and it was too awesome not to sink to the dirty tactic of wide eyes punctuated by exclamations about how awesome the hot rod was and how much he misses driving anything that comes in contact with the ground. Mostly because sometimes Shiro needs a break from taking charge and needs Keith to resort to dirty tricks to make him take that break. 

Because he’s driving, Keith can’t look up and admire the arm of the Milky Way as easily as Shiro can. Of course, Keith would never begrudge Shiro any sight of the cosmos he’d literally cheated death to explore. On these long stretches of Route 66, Keith won’t have to pay attention to for a good while, so he lets his eyes wander to the starlit man to his right. Even more than under the soft, decadent lighting of any of their pit-stops—tourist traps and dive-bars and old hotels—Shiro is beautiful here, under the stars, where all the contrasts that live in him rise to the surface to play.

Keith loves that. Always has. The way the straight-laced, straight-spined officer of the Galaxy Garrison bent the rules for a punk kid and not only got him out of an extremely ugly stint with the juvenile justice system but then made him his protege. How he’d taken Keith out for hover bike rides that were in _no way authorized_. How as the most senior officer on the Blue Lion—and, at that, the only adult—but he’d asked the okay of a bunch of teenagers when they found themselves in an extraterrestrial spaceship. How even when his consciousness was somewhere else entirely—mostly—probably—Shiro had said “That’s the Keith I remember” when Keith had really started to fight like he meant it. At the end of the day, Shiro wasn’t any better about bending the rules than Keith was, himself—despite what everyone else thought of the Captain of the Atlas.

So, perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that they’d eloped.

Not at all; but particularly, not under the glow of a city that made it so easy.

No, the Vegas wedding hadn’t been what either of them had planned. But they’d been there, doing some not-terribly-important reconnaissance about the state of potential alien insurgence in the (remaining) major human settlements. And in passing the mostly-tourist Fremont Street, where a few of the county’s significant offices were still housed, they’d seen the sign that hung lit like Christmas over the Marriage License Bureau. Just as lurid and neon-blue as it had stood for a thousand years—even if neon hadn’t been used for hundreds of them. It didn’t matter; it was the same spontaneity prompting them as had prompted countless couples before them.

They’d stopped, on the concrete steps, to talk about it. They hadn’t always talked about what their plans were, or even what they meant to each other. They’d always been able to follow one another seamlessly enough that it didn’t really matter where they ended up. 

It matters, now. Nothing matters more, to Keith, than the fact that he can look to his right and see the stars on the horizon interrupted by the profile of the person he’s loved the longest of anyone in his life. 

And it mattered, then, under the flashy lights of that city they passed through, as they had passed through so many before. On the third stair from the top of that government building, Shiro’s metal hand had slipped into his own and pulled him to a stop.

“Aren't there others that deserve to be a part of this?”

He’s said it so gently, Keith slow himself down enough to do the same. 

“Sure,” Keith had answered. “They do. And they will be. They _have been_ a part of it, but…” 

Keith trails off. He gets distracted. Blinded, by the sight of Shiro now, under the familiar stars—of him, then, lit by lights of an unfamiliar city.

“But what, beautiful?” the Shiro of his memory asks.

“But what do we deserve?” Keith had answered. 

Shiro had thought about it—really thought about it, in that far-reaching, strategic way he has, that way that always made Keith want to be the kind of leader who thinks that long-term, rather than one who is so focused on the next step, the next mission, that he can’t see anything else. But in this, in deciding on a future, maybe they need that dichotomous vision.

"What do we deserve?" Shiro repeated, raising Keith's hand, palm-up, to kiss. "To live. Freely, in a world we helped make free."

Ultimately, what Shiro had settled on was something that Keith has come to agree with more with every mile they drive. Something that can give them both now and infinity.

“Whatever we deserve, _you_ deserve more than the stars.”

Luckily, as Keith watches Shiro stretch out in the passenger seat under a midnight glow, he thinks Shiro deserves exactly the same.

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly didn’t know there’s a [Natalie Cole song of this same title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqiKIfVfFpc) until after I wrote this so now just imagine them driving with that top down into the sunset with this playing over an AM radio~
> 
> ANYWAY I have to say I reeeeally like writing them in the Southwest, and this is not the only thing I have in the works in this setting. 
> 
> ***
> 
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